Research and Publications Database

The NRFSN research and publications database leads users to regionally relevant fire science. There are nearly 4,000 documents, which have been carefully categorized by the NRFSN to highlight topics and ecosystems important in the Northern Rockies Region. Categorized resources include records from the Joint Fire Science Program (JFSP), Fire Research and Management Exchange System (FRAMES), and Fire Effects Information System (FEIS).

Note: Additional Northern Rockies fire research is available from our Webinar & Video Archive, which provides access to webinars, videos, podcasts, and seminars.

Hints: By default, the Search Terms box reads and searches for terms as if there were AND operators between them. To search for one or more terms, use the OR operator. Use quotation marks around phrases or to search for exact terms. To maximize the search function, use the Search Terms box for other information (e.g. author(s), date, species of interest, additional fire topics) together with the topic, ecosystem, and/or resource type terms from the lists. Additional information is available in our documents on topics, ecosystems, and types.

In large-scale mass fires generated in forests or by a nuclear event, the area of the fire is large (diameter 1 or more kilometers) whereas the flame height is relatively small (less than 10 m) creating a large turbulent buoyant plume. This paper determines a correlation for the magnitude of velocity such a flow generates near above...

Extreme Wildfire Events and Disasters: Root Causes and New Management Strategies highlights the urgent need for new methods to prepare and mitigate the effects of these events. Using a multidisciplinary, socio-ecological approach, the book discusses the roots of the problem, presenting a new, innovative approach to wildfire...

Laboratory experiments were conducted to determine whether stationary fire whirls just downwind of a meter-scale turbulent flame are the lowest part of the counter-rotating vortex pair (CVP) of the plume from the flame. Plumes from a turbulent pool fire and air flow around the fire were visualized. There are two types of stationary...

From the front line of the Camp Fire, the deadliest wildfire in California history, NOVA tells the stories of residents who had to flee for their lives during the 2018 fire season. Scientists racing to understand what’s behind the rise of record-breaking megafires across the American West take to the forest, and even a fire lab, in...

Stand structure and fuel mass were measured in 2011, 13 years after logging of a seasonally dry, ponderosa pine-dominated forest that had burned severely in the 1996 Summit Wildfire, Malheur National Forest, northeastern Oregon, U.S.A. Data are compared to those taken one year after post-fire logging (1999), and analyzed in the...

Fuel, aridity, and ignition switches were all on in 2017, making it one of the largest and costliest wildfire years in the United States (U.S.) since national reporting began. Anthropogenic climate change helped flip on some of these switches rapidly in 2017, and kept them on for longer than usual. Anthropogenic changes to the fire...

Hypotheses that megafires ‐ very large, high impact fires ‐ are caused by either climate effects such as drought or fuel accumulation due to fire exclusion with accompanying changes to forest structure have long been alleged and guided policy but their physical basis remains untested. Here, unique airborne observations and...

Every year worldwide some extraordinary wildfires occur, overwhelming suppression capabilities, causing substantial damages, and often resulting in fatalities. Given their increasing frequency, there is a debate about how to address these wildfires with significant social impacts, but there is no agreement upon terminology to...

Large wildfires with uncharacteristically high severity are occurring more frequently in western U.S. forests. The increasing size and severity of wildfires has been attributed to both an increase in weather conducive to fire spread and changes to forest structure and fuel loads due to management practices that included fire...